


This Liminal Space of Stars

by Starships



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Aetherical nonsense, Angst, Comfort Sex, Foursome, Ghost foursome?, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Porn with Feelings, Who, Who says your husband is dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:15:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22996054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starships/pseuds/Starships
Summary: “This is a dream,” she chokes, tears blurring her vision of him even as he fucks her.“Yes,” he says, tenderly. An apology.“Are you real?”He thumbs her clit, dragging slow circles that no one living knows will make her come.“I don’t know.”
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light/Urianger Augurelt/Thancred Waters, Urianger Augurelt/Thancred Waters, Urianger Augurelt/Warrior of Light/Thancred Waters
Comments: 16
Kudos: 105





	1. Chapter 1

_In this space of light and magic, she knows it is Hades by the smell of ozone and the claws at her throat. She knows it is him when he rubs his aether along the inside of her, a stroke to velvet against the grain, a tightening against her neck from the inside while he toys with the notion of choking her to death, of kissing her until she is empty and he is once again full. What was before, but is not yet -- what choice they will make now, what ruin they will wring from the other's broken back._

_They have been children with matchsticks ever since Amaurot, and she burns as hotly as the dawn when she killed him half a moon ago, as hotly as the sun over grassy plains an eon past when she sundered her own heart to save his._

_She raises her hands and threads their fingers together like fine lace. She presses his foreclaw in, and in, until a garnet drop of blood wells to fullness and tumbles down along her breasts, leaving only a stain behind._

_"What do we do now?" she whispers, even as Hades pushes harder against her skin, even as he leans down to taste her blood and take his time licking her clean._

_"I don't know," he murmurs, and the endless span of the Void around them eats his words._

_His second gilded claw flicks the fabric of her shirt, splits it cleanly above her nipple. The golden light of his eyes is molten inside of her._

_"You need to wake up, my love._ **_Wake up._** _"_

_She does._

* * *

She can't bring herself to leave the First. It isn't only the Scions, though it has been years now since she decided they are the family she will not walk away from. Here, now, it is this railing within Amaurot: it is golden (everything is golden) and weakening. Weeks ago it could hold her weight as she leaned on it, and now it cannot.

His aether is fading, even as her dreams of him truss her heart up like a Starlight roast.

She has taken to sleeping with Thancred and Urianger since they began. The first time had been an anomaly, dragged back from Eden bloodied and crying for reasons she couldn't name or wouldn’t speak. Urianger had said nothing, just swept her tears away with his thumbs and a kiss to her brow as Thancred rinsed the dry blood from her body with a soft cloth. They had wrapped her in quilts and tucked her against the fire, and she had told them… everything. Told them about _him_. About them.

When she fled to the Crystarium the next day with only flimsy excuses tumbling from her lips in the weak, watery light of morning, they kindly said nothing and let her go.

Tonight, the Bookman's Shelves close in around her like warm water. The arms of her companions wrapping her body act as an anchor, keeping her safe and weighted, resting on the seafloor (not the seafloor, don't think--).

It is kind, the way they have folded her into their love. Ryne cooks breakfast most days, Thancred telling her baking powder and baking soda are surely the same thing and Urianger following hot on his heels to save them all from rubbery biscuits. Thancred runs drills for them, and she has been practicing her dagger work alongside Ryne, so used to a staff in her hands instead of the keenness of a blade. Urianger reads them all to sleep at night, and once Ryne is asleep upstairs, the remaining three all disrobe together and press skin to skin until the horrors they carved away from the world are a ghost compared to their warmth under the covers.

She hears him like this, sometimes. Sandwiched between Urianger and Thancred, the latter's snores and the former's idle fingers moving along her skin, she shivers uncontrollably as the jolt of Hades’ voice travels the length of her spine. He speaks, but she is unsure if he is a hallucination, a feverish desire made manifest.

Tonight, he purrs inside of her, and she can feel his pleasure that she is cared for even as she half-asleep ruts herself against Urianger’s hip.

_You are safe here. Rest._

She allows the distant heat of him to drag her under the waves.

* * *

_It’s twilight, here. A constant gloaming and a light breeze on her skin that smells of the sea._

_He is clammy underneath her, slick from their coupling; when she licks a stripe along his sternum he tastes of brine. Her toes dig into the grass, and the songs of birds that have been dead for tens of thousands of years call to her._

_She feels like she is floating, here with him._

_She feels free._

_She raises her body and slams down, the eternal rhythm, the stretch of his cock at home inside of her (where it belongs, where he belongs,_ **_where he belongs_ ** _\--). She reaches to where they are joined and takes him in hand, gripping his base as he disappears inside her._

_“This is a dream,” she chokes, tears blurring her vision of him even as he fucks her._

_“Yes,” he says, tenderly. An apology._

_“Are you real?”_

_He thumbs her clit, dragging slow circles that no one living knows will make her come._

_“I don’t know.”_

_“Is this?”_

_Coming. She’s-- she’s going to--_

_He sits abruptly, the pace of his thumb mercilessly, cruelly steady. He clutches her against his body, cherishing. Desperate._

_“I hope so,” he whispers into her mouth, and she falls apart in a sea of starlight._

* * *

She knows by the smell when she wakes that Thancred has let Ryne use too much cinnamon again.

Just like she knows from the way Urianger has her pinned in his gaze from the armchair by the fire that she was not quiet as she slept. 

“Emet-Selch?” he asks, but she shakes her head and gently corrects him.

“Hades.”

“Be they vision, or dream?”

The air leaves her lungs, and she is bereft. “I don’t know.”

He nods sharply, and stands to help her dress for the day, his steady fingers efficiently closing both buttons and buckles even as his fingertips linger too long on her nipples. He is assessing her, scenting how she is already wet and primed from her dream, and for a moment she thinks he is more predator than guardian, that he will bend her over and fuck her until she breaks.

She would let him, starving as she is.

He steps back, instead. Half hard through his robes, gaze fixed to the floor.

“Break thy fast, my friend. And e’er long we shall find out together.”

In the kitchen, between sodden bites of pastry dipped in birch syrup and Ryne’s laughter (how hadn’t she noticed that Ryne never laughed?), she tells them of seeing Hades. Thancred balks, mug of dark coffee halfway to his lips, and only declares, “You’re all insane.” Urianger is nodding along as though dreaming of the dead husband you yourself killed is normal as he tucks into his eggs.

Ryne shrugs, grating _more_ cinnamon bark onto her leavened cakes. “If it’s really him, you’ll know soon.”

“How?”

Ryne smiles, a self assured look that is foreign to her face, and gives a dainty shrug. “He loves you,” she says simply.

And that is that.

* * *

_The dreams do not stop, and she finds herself sleeping at all hours of the day, arms heavy, her usual fervor instead a listless malaise. Her appetite wanes, her hair hangs limp, and Hades’ anger with her grows each night._

_“You have to stop this.” Tonight, he is a formless light seeping into her skin, warming her from the inside of her mind. She is safe, and floating on an amethyst cloud of his aether, her cells a singing choir basking in his glow._ **_Finally home_ ** _. “You have to eat.”_

_“I’m not needed anywhere but here.”_

_“_ **_I_ ** _need you to eat.”_

 _“Well,_ **_I_ ** _need_ **_you_** _,” she snaps. The truth should be freeing, but it is only bitter blood in her mouth. “I need you and you aren’t here.”_

_“I want to be.”_

_She spreads her fingers along her abdomen, caressing his amethyst light. It curls around her._

_“I don’t care.” She spins a fingertip in the glow, and he murmurs contentedly with a backdrop of irritation. “I want you to prove it. I want_ **_you_** _.”_

_He dims, almost in hesitation, before flaring._

_“Open, then. Open for me.”_

* * *

She wakes with a needy keen, full of Urianger’s fingers and her nape held in Thancred’s teeth. The two men are undulating against her, but the frenzy is new, electric; Hades is there, too, between all of them. He is a shark in the water, circling, just as starving as she, and she is brimming to overflow with his aether. 

The head of Thancred’s cock nudges her entrance, the space shared with Urianger’s hand, and she hikes her leg back over his hip to guide him in. The thrill of being _touched_ again after thousands of years is remarkable, her nerves like Amaurot’s infrastructure burning down around them, brick by brick the city falls while Thancred fucks her hard, _so hard_ , his shaft reaching to her cervix and his grunts in time with her heart as she realizes it is Hades milking him, Hades wringing pleasure from him with her cunt, Hades setting her voice free as Urianger sets a punishing pace on her clit. 

“He’s here,” she feels the need to tell them, barely manages the words between gritted teeth. She feels insane, dizzy with want and a lack of presence. Her toes are curling with pleasure as Thancred pulls her back by her hair, baring her throat to Urianger’s eager, razor sharp smile. He is rutting himself between her folds in time with Thancred’s thrusts, and she knows they will all come like this, but not before they are all maimed and mangled at their altar of their desperation. 

Urianger bites, and sucks. She cups his length in her hand and presses it into her wetness, the fat head of him nudging her entrance, and he won’t fit but it doesn’t mean Hades doesn’t want them both inside of her, doesn’t want to mold her flesh until they can fuck and thrust and fill until she is overwhelmed and drowning in pleasure. 

Thancred tips her head back using the fist in her hair almost to the point of pain, but his thrusts don’t slow. “Do you _want_ him here, darling?”

The thought of _not_ wanting Hades had never occurred to her. What could Thancred even do, if she said no? There was no auracite that could drive him from her willing body, nothing a mortal man could do to exorcise her mate from her being. She had been far too long without Hades already.

“Yes,” she says, voice breaking to a staccato hiss as Urianger slides a finger alongside Thancred’s cock, stretching her center until it brims with pressure. “ _Yes!_ ”

She can feel as their eyes meet over her body, as they reach some sort of understanding. Urianger nods and stands, and Thancred shoves her forcefully to her stomach in the space his lover has just vacated. Her head is off their bed, supported by his unrelenting grip on her hair. His thrusts are brutal now, hard and fast and devoid of mercy, and as her mouth opens with a startled sound Urianger takes advantage and slides his cock sweetly between her lips. 

They thrust in sync with each other, stuffing her full and emptying her out; she feels like coral clinging to the drowned skeleton of her home, the tide pulling her in until she can’t breathe, until she shakes and falls apart--an inevitability. Hades is expanding inside of her, singing in their mother tongue, feeding on her pleasure and shoving pulses of his own into her cunt until she is more than positive that she will die here. 

Someone is petting her face, and someone else has shoved folds of the quilt beneath her to buck against. Her chin is slick with saliva and all of their bodies shine with sweat. When Urianger comes and she swallows, Hades _gorges_ , the salt on her tongue no different than the brine of the Tempest--the closest echo of home and peace for such a brittle number of years. Thancred soon follows and she can’t help herself, as she comes with him she cups her hand over herself to keep his seed there, to push it back in, to feed the beast that must be overwhelmed to sleep. His fingers join hers, and then Urianger’s, and Hades purrs in contentment at being held, and safe, and loved, as they finger her to another orgasm, as one after the other cleans her with their tongue, as they tuck her sated and heavy into sleep.

It is dreamless, and they are free. 


	2. Chapter 2

Where does her existence begin?

It seems like nonsense, to not know. 

Fog is smothering Il Mheg, licking at the windows of their home; her hand leaves a mark in the cool condensation as she rides Urianger hard, slapping the glass for balance. He is fucking her for the third time that day, strong and wide and deep, but she hears the siren call of waves that lap at her. She can see no further ahead into time than she can outside, but the cavern inside of her aches to be filled and Hades is feral as he cracks her open like an egg and wrings a gushing orgasm from her exhausted body. 

Urianger is draining his own aether to keep up with her. She knows this, even as she greedily sucks it into herself, even as his broad hand cups an entire side of her face and his tongue slips inside her mouth. He is more tender here than he is with his cock inside of her; there, he breaks her, fucks her raw, wave after wave of come keeping her slick while he keeps pushing, spreading, demanding, taking. But here -- the kiss he gives her is that of her friend. He cradles her like she is precious and fragile, reaching up as though she is as out of reach as the sky. He does not judge her, and simply gives her what she needs. 

She takes.

And _takes_.

Glimpses of song ring in her head, a painful cacophony as she remembers: Hades. _Greedy little thing, aren’t you,_ he had said with wonder inside of him the first time their bodies had joined, their aether had kissed. Their first time in an alley behind his office, only months after donning his red mask, and she couldn’t wait. (No time at all for immortals. A blink. Nothing more.)

She had broken convention, slid her hand into his robes. The taboo held them both taut on a string, and he looked at her like she had hung the stars themselves.

Her soul remembers that look. Perhaps vanity is one of her defining traits, these days. She feels her power more keenly than she ever has since she was sundered, her ability to shape the world and the universe around her as she sees fit. Her chest puffs with pride as she stuffs a breast into Urianger’s hungry mouth. He moans brokenly against her skin, and she knows he is close to coming inside her again.

Will continue to do so, as long as she asks. As long as she _needs_.

 _Greedy little thing,_ Hades affirms now, and yes, it is true; she is.

Urianger comes in an unstoppable flood, his head pushed back into their ruined pillows, hair a sweat-caked mess. His fingertips paint her in ten more bruises. 

She isn’t ready yet. She isn’t done. As he finishes, heavy and sunken into their mattress, she rises from the tide of them and puts her cunt over his face, feeds his come back into his eager mouth.

“You aren’t done serving me yet,” she says, the words a deep echo that is not her own. There are two voices inside her. Two demands. Two octaves.

Two monarchs.

“Nay, my lady; ‘twoud seem I am not.” The glint in his eye is exhausted yet feral; he is a cornered animal drained of everything he has, and he is fading further to feed his mate.

Except she is not his mate. Thancred is -- and she is taking him. She is harming her dearest friends.

 _You are their queen_ , her sorcerer's voice purrs from within her skin. _Rise up._

Urianger’s tongue spears her folds, aims deep for her spongy walls that he knows will make her gush against him. In this, she knows the truth: he is her celebrant. She thinks distantly she should stop, but the pleasure drags her under the surf. She comes, and comes, and comes, and every drop of her is swallowed. The strength of her fists splinter the headboard, the iron of her thighs robs her friend of breath. He is gasping when she releases him. 

There is salt on her face, and for a moment she leaves her body and feels the sea spray outside Amaurot, where last she felt truly home. The mist is cool, and refreshing; she has a meeting later, and then tea with Hades. Her toes grip the sand, and she thinks about redecorating her apartment. 

Trembling as he is, Urianger still wipes her tears with his broad thumbs, still whispers tender nonsense until she is tucked in and quiet.

She tastes only salt, and Hades is quiet as she goes under.

* * *

Urianger sleeps for two days. 

Thancred’s mouth is a grim line as he tends to his beloved. He has sent Ryne to train with the Exarch, an excuse both flimsy and unquestioned. 

He doesn’t yell, or chastise her. 

He forgives her. 

He asks what she needs.

She kisses him hard on the mouth, her lips closed tightly so the flood of remorse doesn’t spill from her and drown him too.

“I love you both so much,” she whispers into his neck as they hug, a wholesome gesture that belies the bedside they watch over. “I’m so sorry.”

“Are you?” he asks. It is neutral and free of judgement -- he simply wants to know. He loves her, too. So much. Resolve crystalizes inside her, clear and sharp.

“Yes,” she says, and at last her voice is firm. “I’m going to fix this. I promise.”

He nods, understanding her perfectly. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says, punching her in the arm and pinching her cheek.

It is the most Thancred thing she has ever heard, and it startles a laugh out of her. It feels _good_.

Even Hades glimmers with hope inside of her. _Let’s go home,_ he says. _We have everything we need._

She gathers her husband’s shining aether inside of her and teleports.

The stars are waiting for them both.

* * *

Their work is methodical.

She rips the garishly pale roots of gardenias and wisterias up to the light of the Tempest, and they dissolve into the motes of aether they are, finally freed from their desperate bonds. Stone by stone she shatters the streets of Amaurot, and he allows their atoms to dissipate. She knows that if he had a throat it would choke on the enormity of the task before them.

The city is gargantuan; the eons of his life and depths in which he was hollow allowed him to fill himself to the brim with memories, and fill himself he did. The gleaming capitol could have housed millions comfortably, were it real.

But it is not.

There is something cathartic in her wanton destruction. She remembers the pit in her stomach as she vomited light at his feet in the sky above their home, as she thrust her soul forward to rip him to pieces and watch him die in the first light of day.

She couldn’t cry, after. Only Thancred had looked at her like he understood.

Hades, too, finds catharsis in destroying the facsimile of their happiest memories. He burns hot with the promise of a new future. _Their_ future. 

They set every single shade free. She has his sight now, too, and Hades loves each recording of a person he once knew as they are reduced to light and softness that meanders to the lifestream. She listens to their stories. She learns, she hopes, she comforts.

When they say goodbye to Hythlodaeus, she sleeps for days.

She swims in the rooftop pool of their old home before shoving her power into it and breaking it into its basest form. They have a meal in the cafe that made those gooseberry pies she loved before she smashes the glass counters and splinters the chairs until she can see the ocean floor.

They fuck, again and again. He is fond of thrusting into her without warning, sliding his essence as deep and wide as she can take until she is sure that _she_ is what will be destroyed. Their trysts are frequent and public, though there are no true eyes to witness them. She’s lost track of how many times she has come shoved into the alley of a municipal building, and she no longer holds her power back; when she shatters, so does everything around her.

It takes them months. When they are done, she presses her palm gratefully into the earth, and Hades shares her own thoughts for her.

_Let’s go home._

After so achingly long, it is no longer the rushing of the waves that calls to them.

* * *

Il Mheg is lit by a blood moon when they return, it’s crimson halo adding to the ethereal power of the flowers that crush underneath her heel. Their explosion of perfume is nostalgic, as though she had been away for a lifetime. She inhales, treasuring the stretch of her lungs.

Her power gleams, raw aether feeding the soil and flora around her. The Unsundered inside of her holds himself high, prowling like a god toward the massive doors of the Bookman’s Shelves.

They don’t bother knocking.

She feels only two souls inside, intimately twined together, and she nudges them with her mind.

Thancred’s haughty voice drifts to the doorway in greeting. 

“What do you think you’re doing, still wearing all those clothes?”

A piece she did not know was askew clicks into place in her mind. Her instinct when she left had proven true: she would always be welcome here.

Urianger’s unfettered moan reaches her next, and her core clenches around nothing. Thancred must have hit him deep; he rarely sounds so broken.

Her armor falls first, then her underthings. She is more exposed but less vulnerable than she can remember in all her many lifetimes, and her steps forward are sure and steady. 

Urianger is blindfolded on his back. She reaches forward to stroke him, and he jolts at the touch of her much smaller hand on his shaft. Thancred’s cock as it pulls back is an angry, swollen red, visible for the briefest of seconds before thrusting brutally back in.

“Hi,” she says.

A laugh and a groan spill out of their throats together, and it is a beautiful sound. 

She _feels_ like laughing. Soaring, even. She is the master of all that she wants to be.

She kneels by the bed to whisper in Urianger’s ear, petting his sweat-soaked hair. 

“Thank you, for everything. Truly.” A gentle kiss to his brow. “I’m going to ruin you now, if you don’t quite mind.”

She slithers between their bodies and licks him from root to tip, relaxes her throat and swallows him down. He’s proportional, much too big for her, but she is determined; she encourages Thancred to keep fucking into their lover with a hand on his ass as she lets Urianger’s cock dive beyond her gag reflex.

He shouts, rough and divine. Hades extends beyond her body to pinch his nipples to hardness, to soothe his hair back, to grip the base of Thancred’s cock as it moves. He is everywhere except inside of _her_ ; he very much understands that this moment is for her friends.

Her angle is awkward, honestly. She is half on and half off the bed, head tilted uncomfortably and lips stretched around an aching cock. Her knee is digging uncomfortably into the bedframe. 

She is of a mind to care about none of these things, except Urianger’s massive hands reach for her hips and swing her over his body as though she weighs nothing. She may be the most powerful being in the universe right now, but it still takes every drop of concentration she has to keep her mouth relaxed around him as he moves her. 

_It’s the simple things_ , Hades says, laughing at her. 

_Shut up,_ she says back. _You don’t even have a face and I know it’s smug._

She short circuits when a tongue spears her folds, devours her like he was starved of her.

Like he missed her. 

Her moan is genuine and raw around him. They sloppily suck at each other while Thancred watches, his hand wandering to her backside and squeezing hard as he thrusts. Their sex has always been brutal, all four of them more prone to deriving pleasure from extremes, but today it feels as firm as it is overwhelming. Like one of Gosetsu’s hugs that would crack all of your ribs but warm you to your toes. 

She would smile, but her mouth is full. She settles for grinding her clit onto Urianger’s chin instead.

They undulate together, a tumultuous wave of rapidly firing synapses and ugly grunts of desire. Time loses meaning. She comes once or twice, gentle and quiet orgasms that soothe her into softness. Tension leaves her body and she pushes deeper onto Urianger’s cock, pressing her nose into his skin and digging her nails into his thighs. 

She had missed him, too.

She feasts greedily when he comes, Thancred following with a vulgar curse. She puts on a show of swallowing their lover’s seed and licking his shaft clean.

Time stretches as the music of their breathing slows.

“I’m going to draw us a bath,” she says, and stands on shaking legs to make her way to the stairs. Nothing about their bedroom had changed in her time away, save which books were scattered on which surfaces. She found she liked that. 

_Scent the water with lavender. Urianger likes it._

Nodding to herself, she goes to do just that.

* * *

In the deepest part of night, the flower-laden breeze of Il Mheg kisses their skin as they sit outside with tea, drenched in the gaze of stars.

“Amaurot is gone,” she says, the physical weight of the words lifting as they tumble from her lips.

Thancred grips her chin with his thumb and forefinger and holds her gaze unflinchingly. “For now,” he says, and there is no room to argue. They will help her rebuild, together with Hades. Make a new Amaurot; a world that has no need for heroes.

The doors to her heart widen. She thinks, just maybe, they will never close again.

“For now.”


End file.
